Culture

The scaffolding TMZ headline became a tower of terror for Rihanna fans: “Johnny Depp. Savage X Fenty Guess Appearance. In Rihanna’s show!!!” Variety confirmed that, yes, Johnny Depp would appear in Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Vol.4 on Wednesday, streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime. Depp is the first male celebrity to be a featured guest at one of Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty shows (even though he isn’t mentioned in the press release, which means he was supposed to be a surprise). Past celebrity guests have included Cindy Crawford and Erykah Badu. Savage X Fenty is Rihanna’s global lingerie brand. Its brand ID is built around “diversity and inclusion in sizing, access,” wrote Forbes, “and marketing can lead to an even greater goal, equity in feeling sexy.

My favorite Paul Newman performance is his final on-screen one, as mob boss John Rooney in Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition. It’s a good, not great, film, which is a disappointment given its phenomenal cast and to-die-for Conrad Hall cinematography. But there’s something unique in Newman’s contained performance as a man of infinite complexity, someone as comfortable playing a piano duet with his surrogate son as breathing portentously of his profession, "This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see heaven.

American Horror Story’s eleventh season is a tableau of New York’s gay subcultures, thriving in its 1981, pre-AIDS glory. Its characters are male eye candy in jockstraps and stripy socks, daddies in leather straps and twinks out for a laugh. As Kal Penn’s cynical police commissioner summarizes, "That community? They come here for a reason. They come here to get lost, and that's exactly what they do.” The style? A mood board of Mugler costume-fashion, Chrome Hearts leather jackets, Lagerfeld’s filled shoulder pads and Calvin Klein underwear billboards. But its premise is that of an earlier and much more controversial gay masterpiece: Cruising.

Apple Music has “quietly” removed two of Kanye West’s playlists from its platform. This news was leaked to the music press quietly, of course, and has (thus far) produced tons of free media impressions for the streamer. The move was presumably a shrewd public relations stunt, or maybe a rogue employee with coding skills. Who knows? But the media framed it as Apple Music taking a stand, quietly, of course, as the streamer repositions itself in the headlines after it announced last week that it was raising subscription prices. “De-platforming” Kanye West is messaging they’d like to piggyback, for obvious reasons, as it appeals to a swath of bored subscribers who could end up tweeting Apple Music for not being on the “right side of history.

Here are the facts: Kanye West should be in a psychiatric hospital. Instead, he’s speaking his mind, or what’s left of it. For what it’s worth, Kanye West should not be tweeting or going on podcasts. Unlike the side effects of a prescription drug, the results don’t vary. No, the outcome is usually the same, in one form or another: career suicide. Kanye West’s artistic legacy is undergoing seppuku. We've seen this movie before. Remember Roseanne? After a racist tweet in 2018, ABC immediately canceled her show (it was going to be her comeback). Hulu followed up by removing every season of Roseanne from their streaming service.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

The recent downfall and shaming of Kanye West was likely to have been greeted with schadenfreude by at least one 32-year-old pop star. In 2009, West interrupted Taylor Swift's winning best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards to inform her that the gong should have gone to Beyoncé instead. Their relationship ever since has been a gossip-friendly roundabout of fallout, reconciliation, sniping and bitching. West’s current defenestration from public life, owing to antisemitic comments he made, has not been publicly alluded to by Swift yet. But the lyrics from the song "Karma" on her new album Midnights might make tacit reference to their ongoing feud, as Swift castigates an anonymous man for "talking shit/For the hell of it/Addicted to betrayal but you're relevant.

As we stumble closer and closer towards nuclear war, environmental destruction and societal collapse, young people are feeling understandably a little hopeless. Some are shooting up schools; others are dumping hundreds of gallons of milk out onto grocery store floors to promote a “plant-based future.” Historically, when people are ideologically hopeless, they destroy art. The two disgruntled they/thems who recently threw two cans of Heinz tomato soup on Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers" thought that by defacing an oil painting depicting the sublime fruits of an unscorched earth they would draw attention to their cause: ending all oil consumption and thereby saving the planet. https://twitter.

David O. Russell is one of a small handful of directors whose involvement with a project is enough to get me to see it immediately. From the offbeat energy of Silver Linings Playbook to the tangled period drama of American Hustle, his films are tightly edited and always thick with talented actors. Amsterdam, his latest, is no exception. While it’s thematically fluffy and periodically tends toward the indulgent, it's never anything less than entertaining. There are far worse ways to spend a few hours, especially in the midst of a cinematic drought. Picking up in 1933, Amsterdam is the tale of two injured World War I veterans, slightly disreputable doctor Burt Berendson (Christian Bale) and successful attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington).

The only time I ever saw Angela Lansbury on stage was in 2014 in London, when she played the half-baked medium Madame Arcati in a revival of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit. Although it was rumored that the then-88-year-old Lansbury was having her lines fed to her via earpieces, it did not affect her comic timing one iota. It is no exaggeration to say that Lansbury took a character who has passed into over-familiarity via decades of revivals and made her fresh and hilarious once again. For anyone to achieve this is remarkable, but to do so at an age when most actors would have long since retired is little short of phenomenal. Lansbury’s death at the age of 96 — a few days shy of her 97th birthday — has some uncanny parallels with the recent passing of the Queen.

Country music superstar Loretta Lynn died last week at the age of 90. Many in the media are remembering her as a feminist and several of her songs as feminist anthems. Yet Lynn herself said, “I'm not a big fan of Women’s Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they’re due.” It’s not surprising that the left wants to claim Lynn as one of their own — she was a badass and extremely successful. But in listening to her music and digging deeper into Lynn’s life, I’ve come to view “The First Lady of Country Music” not as a typical man-hating feminist, but rather as someone who was proud of the heritage that made her a tough woman and who wanted to use her remarkable musical gifts to uplift millions of women who shared her experiences.

One of the things Cockburn likes best about working for The Spectator is its unswerving devotion to the policy debates that matter. In that intellectual spirit, and bearing in mind the recent photo of Pennsylvania Republican candidate Dr. Oz holding a glass of Cab at a Penn State tailgate, he's proud to announce our first ever Spectator World symposium, featuring the views of his colleagues. Today's subject: is it ever acceptable to drink wine at a football tailgate? Amber Athey, Washington editor If you’re under the age of forty at a college football tailgate, ideally the only wine you’re drinking is from a box. Acceptable consumption methods are out of an oddly dusty and sticky red solo cup or directly from the spout during a game of "slap the bag.

Something happened in American society between the release of Bros last weekend and 2018, when Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of gay, HIV-positive Queen front man Freddie Mercury, grossed $900 million at the box office. Comedian Billy Eichner’s gay romcom barely eked out a pathetic $4.8 million on opening night, around the same amount that Ellen "Elliot" Page spent on flannel shirts and Groucho Marx glasses last year. Why the disparity in box office takings? Well, American moviegoers became deeply homophobic. That’s according to Eichner himself, who wrote on Twitter following the paltry opening weekend numbers, “That’s just the world we live in, unfortunately.

Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is a film more likely to be remembered for its offscreen drama than its substance. If only the final product that made it onscreen was as spicy: here, a promising premise and intriguing themes are let down by languid pacing, scattershot performances, and a willingness to lapse into preachiness that borders on misandry. Don’t Worry Darling is set in the planned community of “Victory” somewhere in the American West, a town led by self-help guru Frank (Chris Pine, playing a mixture of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and a televangelist — really, he wouldn’t be out of place on The Righteous Gemstones).